You've got a flat screen mounted
on your kitchen wall with zip
ties and chewing gum.
There's an ashtray by your left
wrist, and a tattoo on your right
of a midnight street light sunshine
shine
down
on a reupholstered love seat,
only used twice: once for the Eisenhowers,
once for last weekend watching Seinfeld
reruns, putting out Sonomas and sex talk
on the twill-like cushions in that dank
basement apartment w/ poster'd brick
walls.
Slayer, Sinatra, Sabbath, Springsteen,
a Space Cowboy, and something Sanskrit
above your box-springless mattress
about the cosmos spitting hellfire
next month because we didn't sacrifice
crumpled dollars yesterday, or Clinton
in the '90s. There are masses of humans paying
for the market collapse that sent 800,000
oranges rolling into the street, cold.
God-fearing couples are abstaining from sex
to save their souls from the virgin
Rapture. Cable cords are being unplugged
in the middle of A Christmas Story so people
can hang themselves from church steeples
to avoid ruining their Chuck Taylor Loafer
Tennis Shoes in the molten fuck suffocating
saplings and parking meters. Christ'll save
the righteous ones, the ones strung up closest
to the bell tower.
The parish hall radio says salvation's
only as good as a new haircut.
And that we should all pick up the warped
acoustic guitar in the cellar, and try
to form barre chords with our swollen
knuckles and arthritic wrists now
because punk music will be dead tomorrow.
Hell, the postman will be dead tomorrow,
and every little postcard, paycheck, and print
coupon he's carrying will be dead, too.
There is an ashtray by your left wrist,
and a tattoo on your right.